It is so tempting to believe that everyone would be improved if they just liked the things I like, starting with this majestic power-metal anthem by the French band Manigance. Not only does it instill an inexorable love of existence by its melodic nature, but it gives you a chance to think about whether they're actually singing "I want to feel your breasts" or it's an accent thing, and whether that affects what you think about it or whether you still feel like encouraging other people to listen to it and how those two things relate to each other.

If this run of new metal songs, which for me unravel despair and recenter me in a place of frankly unreasonable faith in humanity, leave you still nasueated by political hypocrisy and climate threat, this is normal.

Into the headphones, play this song. Any song, really, but if you're going to listen to any song, it might as well be what you get, both stylistically and geographically, if you cross CHVRCHES and Nightwish.

Or for four minutes, anyway, and what are weeks? Dark Sarah are the band Heidi Parviainen formed after leaving Amberian Dawn, and Amberian Dawn got a new singer and stayed awesome as well, so that's how you combat entropy.

But this city is part of how we have a daughter, and she wanted to see it, and eat its chocolate croissants and Nutella crepes and raspberry sorbets. Now she has heard French trap booming out of Citroens, and become enraged by Miro and Klein and Ryman.

Kamijo is the solo project of the singer from the visual-kei bands Versailles, Lareine and New Sodmy. Visual Kei is kind of the music of pre-Revolution French nobility reimagined as cyberpunk metal futurism, and involves a distinctive operatic singing technique that sounds a little like you have found a golden-egg-laying duck on palace grounds and are attempting to impress the Queen by killing it with only your fashion sense and your neck muscles.

Ethernity are a progressive power-metal band from Belgium. It used to be that power-metal with a female singer was almost automatically gothic symphonic metal, but there's now a sizable counter-trend of bands pushing more towards pop-chorus catharsis rather than gothic operaticism.

Epica, for example, are one of the definitive gothic symphonic metal bands, and the massed choirs on the chorus of this song are a quinessential gothic flourish, but covering anime songs is unapologetically pop.

And the intersectional queen of gothic symphonic metal and pop and unapologeticality is definitely the Norwegian cover-singer Minniva, who releases near-weekly gothic-metal-ish covers of virtually anything, but often either classic older progressive metal songs or current pop hits. "Africa" is technically neither, but qualifies as an implicit current pop hit due to Weezer's recent cover of it. I hated the Toto original, and I hate Weezer's version, but I accept them as the prices for this version. Part of the fascinating genius of Minniva's cover-series is that she produces them quickly, so they tend to have cheerfully undisguised studio shortcuts like the sputtery drum-machine blastbeats in this one. I find these charming.

Power metal bleeds into folk metal, and where power metal tends to invoke fantasy tropes, and mythology as fantasy, folk metal sometimes edges closer to anthropology, and thus can cultivate bands with an interest in period instruments and musicology. Eluveitie are a Swiss Celtic-folk-metal band who use hurdy-gurdy and bagpipes, and here they are covering a song by the German power-metal band Powerwolf, for the bonus disc of the new Powerwolf album, which has ten other bands covering Powerwolf songs.

Powerwolf themselves are essentially a caricature of a power-metal band, but caricature is kind of the native idiom of power-metal, to begin with. If Eluveitie were archaeologists, Powerwolf would be their friend from high-school, inexplicably brought along to the excavation site, who grabs the just-exhumed ancient relic and climbs on top of something with it, yelling "With this sceptre I am now the rightful King of the Underworld!!!!" And it's probably not even a sceptre, but still, maybe he's right.

Anaal Nathrakh's original gimmick was "extreme-metal band with programmed drums", which at the time was a dramatic microtransgression. Programming has become a steadily less unusual element in black metal, and Anaal Nathrakh's use of it has become steadily more atmospheric and textural.

Vreid are a Norwegian black-metal band formed by the surviving members of an earlier Norwegian black-metal band called Windir, after Windir's singer died of hypothermia in the Norwegian wilderness, which is definitely the black-metalest way to die. (Deaths involving Cthulhu are a respectable but distant second place.)

Skeletonwitch are an Ohio thrash-metal band in the process of evolving into a more expansive black-metal band. Which is what you do if you're the ones who realize the song-title "Devouring Radiant Light" is not taken yet.

Sear Bliss are an atmospheric black metal band from Hungary. A black metal band can qualify for "atmospheric" status by including basically any element of production competence. Synthetic tuba moans, for example.

Manimal are a neo-traditional heavy-metal band from Gothenburg, Sweden. Back when metal was only one thing, before the speed/thrash/death diaspora began, this is what all metal bands sounded like. Or, at least, this is what we now think they all sounded like, bellowy and rifftastic.

Michael Romeo is the guitarist for the American power-metal band Symphony X. If you liked Symphony X but wanted to hear the same kind of music played by all but one different people, your use-case has been prioritized.

a wireless smart-crucible that sometimes freezes the hearts it was supposed to melt, and the troubleshooting FAQ claims you can restart it from the command-line, but not if the command line is controlled by an nihilist voting-block,

You might momentarily think it ironic that a president who would hire his daughter and his son-in-law into government positions for which they have no qualifications, just to have a couple people who don't hate him nearby, would endorse a policy of separating children from parents.

Uada are a primordial black metal band from Portland, Oregon. They have a Facebook page, because Satan needs friends too. I hit Follow on it, because Satan needs friends too, and Facebook cheerfully encouraged me to invite these people to join me in occult appreciation: my sister, who loves "black metal" as long as that's your funny way of saying "Irish Boy Band"; the mother of my oldest childhood friend, whose musical taste I'm not entirely sure about but I don't recall her ever bringing up Satan in conversation during sleep-overs at their house in the 70s; a journalist friend who once wrote a book about Napster so I'll assume he is equipped to find out about Cascadian black metal on his own if he wants; and a guy who got fired from the company where I work, but I haven't unfriended him yet because nobody would tell me why he got fired and anyway Satan needs friends, too.

I don't think I will "invite" any of these people to join me in haphazardly monitoring the social-media presence of a very random subset of the bands that I discover. Cosmic Church are from Finland. I do actually have Facebook friends who like black metal. These are not them.

Wayfarer are from Denver, which is where that childhood friend lives now. His mother visits often, and logistically speaking, the grandson goes to bed relatively early, so the grandparents could go to a euphoric-nihilistic black metal show, presumably staged in a haunted forest somewhere just outside of one of the National Parks.

Oubliette is a French name for an American black metal band from the sadly un-Satanic-sounding town of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. If Google Maps is to be believed, it is an unholy civic tentacle-nest of shameless gerrymandering.

But one's relationship with cartoon Satan is a personal, intimate, nuanced thing. You don't just walk up to people and say "Hey, have you heard about throaty, performative nihilism?" in the same tones you use for "Would you like a free granola bar?"

Come to think of it, I'd rather the granola-bar people didn't use that tone, either. I don't trust free granola. I don't trust people who think I will eat their granola bars just because they are free.

I like the idea of a granola bar with just a touch of carefully denatured head-fever-inducing demonicity. Probably in the end it would just be mildly caffeinated, and would taste like a carrot cake made out of wood pulp, but at least it sounds interesting.

But here's the thing: it's made out of pulverized locust exoskeletons and the ichor of demons you don't even know if I invented a minute ago. It aspires to alter worlds, and they could be your worlds if you want them.

Locusts are mostly pulverized wheat in the first place. We have only this one planet, so nothing is really that exotic. CHVRCHES are an occult black metal band from Scotland, except the singing is clear and bell-like instead of hoarse and gnawing, and they play computers instead of the forges of fire giants, but the songs are still about the fear of eternity and the yearning for it, like all good metal songs.

The days these songs were brand new, I was listening to rain on metal roofs in the Judean desert, and calls to prayer in Jerusalem, and what sounded a lot like somebody dragging a metal trashcan down two flights of cement stairs at 4am in an apartment building in Tel Aviv,

I've never spent as much of a trip looking curiously at a thing, and then slowly reaching for my phone to look up a short summary of how 6000 years of history and warring faiths coil themselves inside of a hat

A sentry with a machine-gun demanded to know my religion, but when I said "I have none", she just shrugged and waved me past onto Temple Mount, where the axis of monotheistic human belief emerges from the Earth.

The difference between rebellion and assimilation is mostly a shift in emphasis from anticipatory manifesto to conciliatory bureaucracy. From promise-keeping to record-keeping, and thus from miracles to choruses.

The first time I heard a dense metal band with a soaring female singer, it was 1997, and the band was called The Gathering, and the singer was Anneke Van Giersbergen, and the thing didn't have a name. VUUR is Anneke's new band, and sometimes a thing escapes and eclipses its inventors, but sometimes it spins a world around them.